Directors, Adam and Zack Khalil, in person!

History is written by the victors, but this film reminds us that the history of the oppressed can still be saved from being extinguished. Native American video artists Adam and Zack Khalil here reclaim the narrative of the Ojibway of Sault Ste. Marie, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, from the archives and museums that would confine it to the past. Using personal interviews, animated drawings, performance, and provocative intercutting, the Khalil brothers’ feature debut makes a bold case for the Ojibway people to be their own storytellers—while seeking a cure for the damage inflicted by colonization—in a spiritual reconnection with tradition.

Adam Shingwak Khalil (Ojibway) is a filmmaker and artist. His practice attempts to subvert traditional forms of ethnography through humor, relation, and transgression. Adam’s work has been exhibited at UnionDocs, e-flux, Maysles Cinema, Microscope Gallery (New York), Museo ExTeresa Arte Actual (Mexico City), Spektrum (Berlin), Trailer Gallery (Sweden), Carnival of eCreativity (Bombay), and Fine Art Film Festival Szolnok (Hungary). Khalil is a UnionDocs Collaborative Fellow and Gates Millennium Scholar. In 2011 he graduated from the Film and Electronic Arts program at Bard College.

Zack Khalil (Ojibway) is a filmmaker and artist from Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, currently based in Brooklyn, NY. His work often explores an indigenous worldview and undermines traditional forms of historical authority through the excavation of alternative histories and the use of innovative documentary forms. He recently completed a B.A. at Bard College in the Film and Electronic Arts Department, and is a UnionDocs Collaborative Fellow and Gates Millennium Scholar.

What can we learn about a society from the way that it treats its lowest ranks? In this brilliantly inventive nonfiction essay, filmmaker Theo Anthony explores the catastrophic failures and prejudices of urban society via the life of the humble brown Norway rat in the city of Baltimore. Featuring a wide-ranging and surprising collection of zealous back-alley rat-hunters, street-wise exterminators, mid-20th century scientists, and racist city planners, Anthony has crafted “an ethnographic and sociological nonfiction horror film” (Filmmaker Magazine) with “a distinctive authorial voice … in debt to his mentor Werner Herzog” (The Hollywood Reporter). Named one of the ten best undistributed movies of 2016, Indiewire.com called Rat Film “fresh and inventive,” and “a striking combination of analysis and creative innovation that communes with the past and present.” Courtesy of Cinema Guild.Screening followed by Q&A with Director Theo Anthony and Run of Life programmers.

It sometimes seems that Eva Marie Rødbro's camera must be invisible. Running close with different groups of young people, she creates compelling eye-level portraits of youth devoid of nostalgia. With astonishing editing and generous observation, Rødbro's docs are completely embedded in the small tight-knit communities she is depicting. Rødbro eschews linear narratives, offering audiences a free-floating relationship with the people onscreen, framing the minutae of their experience as an empathatetic territory, where even those we imagine as very different from us are intimately recognizable.

Danish photographer and director Eva Marie Rødbro (1980) lives and works in Copenhagen, DK. She graduated from the National Danish Film School in 2015 and Gerrit Rietveld Academie in 2008. Rødbro has exhibited and screened internationally at numerous shows, events and festivals including: FOAM, W139, NL fotomuseum, Berlin Documentary Forum, Charlottenborg Kunsthal, CPH:DOX and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. She has documented the wild youth of teenagers in Greenland and the United States in her award winning shorts, Fuck You Kiss Me (2008) I Touched Her Legs (2010), Kriger (2013) Dan Mark (2014), and most recently with We Chose the Milky Way (2015).

The Embedded Documentaries of Eva Marie RødbroPresented by RUN OF LIFEDirector in Attendance!

RECENT WORK BY SASHA LITVINTSEVA

Sasha Litvintseva is an artist, filmmaker, researcher and curator. She was born and raised in Russia and has been based in London since 2004. Her films excavate the layers of history, past and future, embedded in landscape and architecture, and juxtapose and entangle the monumental and the pictorial, narrative and infrastructure, the global and the personal, the human and the geologic, embodiment and temporality, politics and leisure, and ultimately the infinite and the everyday.

She has had solo shows and retrospective screenings at Union Docs, New York, Courtisane Film Festival, Ghent, Close-Up Film Centre, London, AC Institute, New York, Edinburgh Film Guild, Image/Movement, Berlin, Nightingale Cinema, Chicago and VISIONS, Montreal, and her film Evergreen was released on DVD by Filmarmalade in 2015. A graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art she is currently working on an AHRC CHASE funded practice based PhD proposing the concept of geological filmmaking at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she is a founding member of the Screen and Audiovisual Research Unit. She is also an independent curator of contemporary moving image and co-curator of the forthcoming inaugural November Film Festival.

Program Details:Alluvion (2013, HD video, 31 min) A father and his grown children of unnamed nationality, make their way through a Turkish coastal landscape where ancient and modern histories transmute into material spectacle and the nights are filled with incessant entertainment. Amidst remains of mutated cultures, bodies are caught in rituals of sun worship, stagnating in a state of passivity. Disco-lights permeate all, and turquoise toenails float above the city. Millennia old columns are submerged in swimming pools. At a shipyard on the edge of town, a group of men are building an ark, labourers actively asserting meaningful influence upon their surroundings, they may or may not achieve salvation as the film and the world around them all are disintegrating toward an Atlantean End.

Immortality, home and elsewhere (2014, HD video, 12 min)(this is not full definition)

Weaving around a theory of immortality based on the premise that our lives are a summation of all the information we consume and process, gleaned from existing theories from a number of scientific disciplines, the film draws on my personal history’s brush with a global nuclear disaster, to precipitate a meditation on the potential role of an individual in the imaginary film/event of our individual or collective death: as a protagonist, or as an extra appearing in a handful of frames at the very moment of their death.

The (im)possibility of a singular setting for such an event is at question, and there is a temporal flattening accompanying the spacial flattening, both as a collapse of history implied by the end of potential futures, but also the flattening of time implicit in our fascination with ruin.

The uncanny familiarity we gain with spaces through mainstream cinema, which is itself becoming increasingly domesticated, is not unlike what is made possible with streetview. By releasing locations such as the pyramids and the Taj Mahal, themselves monumental attempts at immortality, streetview is declaring itself as a competitor to tourism, tourism itself a chase of experience and self-documentation.

The virtual experience may not quite compare to the real thing yet, but the mediated virtual experience carries the same indexical value as the mediated real thing, being one step removed from the physical world. The question of authenticity in terms of cinematic authorship as well as consumption remains to be answered.

If you could experience everything that ever was, would you still be afraid?

Evergreen (2014, HD video, 27 min)Evergreen explores the crisis of grand narratives in the face of the photographic image. It is a self-deconstructing story of an immortal traveller’s undefinably temporal/spacial journey through inhabited theme parks and museums, islands of time, abandoned cities. A civilisation’s perpetual struggle for perfection and unquenchable documentation of itself, as if driven by knowledge of its looming demise. Heritage as spectacle, spectacle as heritage, nature as both.

Exile Exotic (2015, HD video, 14 min)Steeped in elliptical history and historical simulacra, Exile Exotic is set at a hotel that is a replica of the Kremlin. Narrating the exotic beginnings of my mother’s and my exile from Russia, the film serves as a platform for us to visit the Kremlin again, albeit by the side of a pool. Soundtracked by an operatic score reminiscent of the song of the sirens making Odysseus stray on his long journey home, our story reverberates throughout the scope of Russian history’s limiting of free movement of individuals. This film is a pilgrimage. This film comes in waves.

Inspired by “our duty to fight”, Gallery 400andRun of Life are pleased to present Brett Story’s astute and affecting documentary, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (2016, HD file, 87 min). A longtime prison activist, Story uses a strong structural device to make visible the many sprawling effects of the contemporary American prison system. From the construction of pocket-parks in Los Angeles designed to keep sex offenders out of the neighborhood to a New York City warehouse that specializes in helping families provide care packages to prisoners, The Prison in Twelve Landscapesdeftly eschews the romanticized themes of forgiveness traditional to prison documentaries in exchange for the more consequential web of systemic forces buttressing mass incarceration. Story also employs a wide range of documentary tactics; the connections to the prison institution are clearly laid out in some sections of the doc, while others leave more open space for the viewer to build the relationships themselves, a tactic that encourages further interaction with the central ideas of the movie long after the screening has ended. The Prison in Twelve Landscapes is an important movie and possibly represents a new and sophisticated mode of social justice documentary making.

“It’s not this, that or “a” prison she’s looking for, it’s “The Prison” as institution and idea, American style. Her idea about that idea is clever, damning, and convincing: that to best understand the culture of incarceration in 2016 isn’t to film inside but rather outside of correctional facilities, where America’s prison industrial complex affects innumerable and fundamentally vital aspects of life—from laws and economies to the ways we treat and understand one another.” -Eric Hynes, Film Comment

Brett Story is a writer and independent non-fiction filmmaker based out of Toronto and New York. Her first feature-length documentary, the award-winning Land of Destiny (2010), screened internationally and was broadcast on both Canadian and American television. Her journalism and film criticism have appeared in such outlets as CBC Radio, The Nation Magazine, and Antipode. She was the recipient of the Documentary Organization of Canada Institute’s 2014 New Visions Award and was a nominee for the 2015 Ontario Premier’s Awards for Excellence in the Arts. Brett holds a PhD in geography from the University of Toronto and is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center. The Prison in Twelve Landscapes, Brett’s second feature-length documentary, is currently screening at festivals internationally.

Gallery 400‘s current exhibition, our duty to fight will be on view preceding the screening. Organized by Black Lives Matter Chicago, our duty to fight offers a living testament to the specific and shared struggles that have been at the core of radical, visionary world-making in Chicago organizing. The exhibition invites visitors to join the struggle against state repression and terror while working to build collective power.

This vivid portrait of redemption and survival in Uncertain, Texas, a tiny bayou town on the Louisiana-Texas border, interweaves the stories of three very different men tied to the swampland: an elderly, charismatic fishing guide with a dangerous past; a former addict on an epic quest to kill an elusive wild boar; and a young man who yearns to escape a home that may be heading for extinction. An atmospheric and “hauntingly evocative” (The Hollywood Reporter) journey into the American South, Uncertain is one of the year’s most visually striking and fascinating nonfiction films. Winner of a special directing award at the Tribeca Film Festival and called one of the best documentaries of 2015 byNewsweek magazine.

The inaugural edition of the documentary film festival, DOC10, an initiative of the Chicago Media Project, presents ten Chicago premieres of the best documentaries from 2015-16. These award-winning films present the full spectrum of current nonfiction filmmaking, from important social issue films and captivating music docs to engaging vérité and experimental work. All films include post-screening discussions, as well as musical performances and special events throughout the weekend.

Ephraim Asili's work celebrates the African Diaspora as a cultural force—a lineage of years and miles that influences contemporary African-American identity and the cultural identity of North America in general. Complicating the traditional travelogue, Asili weaves together the near and the far as a way of revealing linkages across history and geography. Through audio-visual examinations of societal iconography identity, geography, and architecture Asili strives to present a personal vision which could be described as an amalgam of pop, African American and “moving image” culture filtered through an acute sense of rhythmic improvisation and compositional awareness.

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Monday, February 22nd, 2016 at 7:00 pmConstellation Chicago (3111 N. Western), $10Presented by Run of Life

Points on a Space Age(2009, video, 33 min.)Points on a Space Age explores the recent activity of the remaining members of the influential Sun Ra Arkestra since the passing of its founding member and examines their current work (in the physical absence of Sun Ra) under the direction of Marshall Allen. - EA

Forged Ways(2011, 16mm transferred to digital video, 16 min.)Photographed on location in Harlem, Ethiopia, Forged Ways combines elements of documentary, narrative, and experimental film form. Structurally the film cycles between the first person account of filmmaker, the third person experience of a man navigating the streets of Harlem, and day-to-day life in cities and villages of Ethiopia. By subduing any definitive story-line or "message" the film functions as an audio visual meditation on the constructs surrounding African American cultural identity while simultaneously examining some of the more subtle implications involved in maintaining an identity that spans hundreds of years, and thousands of miles. - EA

American Hunger(2013, 16mm transferred to digital, 19 minutes)Oscillating between a street festival in Philadelphia, the slave forts and capitol city of Ghana, and the New Jersey shore, American Hunger, explores the relationship between personal experience and collective histories. American fantasies confront African realities. African realities confront American fantasies. African fantasies confront American realities. American realities confront African fantasies. - EA

Many Thousands Gone(2015, 16mm transferred to digital, 9 min.)Filmed on location in Salvador, Brazil (the last city in the Western Hemisphere to outlaw slavery) and Harlem, New York (an international stronghold of the African Diaspora), Many Thousands Gone draws parallels between a summer afternoon on the streets of the two cities. A silent version of the film was given to jazz multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee to use as an interpretive score. The final film is the combination of the images and a modified version of McPhee’s real time “sight reading” of the score. - EA

Ephraim Asili is an African American artist, filmmaker, DJ, radio host, and traveler. Asili's films have screened in in festivals and venues all over the world including The New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Milano Film Festival and the International film festival of Trinidad and Tobago. Currently Asili serves as Technical Director and faculty for the Film and Electronic Arts Department at Bard College and hosts a radio show on WGXC 90.7 FM Hudson, New York.

Inspired by international film critic Ela Bittencourt’s Neither/Nor Series at the 2015 True/False Film Festival, five different Chicago arts organizations collaborate to present this series of rare Polish political documentaries with an experimental slant. Presented at three venues across the city and with Bittencourt in attendance, TO THICKEN, NOT DISTORT will include three programs of work.

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Monday, January 18th, 2016 at 7:00 pmConstellation Chicago (3111 N. Western), $10Presented by Run of LifeEla Bittencourt in attendance

Wednesday, January 20th, 2016 at 7:00 pmThe NIGHTINGALE (1084 N. Milwaukee), $10Presented by Run of Life

HOW TO LIVE (dir. Marcel Łoziński, 1977, 83 min)

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Polish director, Marcel Łoziński, claims “I’m a documentary filmmaker … because I like to ‘thicken’ reality but never to distort it.” This encapsulates the chimeric quality of the movies in this series, forged with aesthetics of absurdism and a prescient sense of what is now the genre we call non-fiction. These works reflect the political climate of Communist Poland and its blacklash. The subjects of these docs are a man willing to lose everything in protest, a former chess champion oppressed by a fascist government, and a worker memorialized in outsized proportion. Portraits of a conflicted era, these movies don’t try to escape their circumstances but rather meld the chaos into humorous and poignant documents of a bygone political age.

Ela Bittencourt is a writer, critic, and film programmer. She has written for a wide range of publications including Artforum, Cineaste, Frieze Magazine, Film Quarterly, Guernica, Los Angeles Review of Books, Senses of Cinema, and Reverse Shot, among others. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University, where she taught essay writing.

TO THICKEN, NOT DISTORT is presented by Constellation Chicago, Run of Life, The Nightingale, and Beguiled Cinema, Society for Arts, and organized by Christy LeMaster and Kathleen Sachs.

This screening will show the 77-minute video, an interactive online projection, and new clips from work by Tirtza Even's SAIC student class documenting juveniles serving life-sentences.

Natural Life is a threefold experimental documentary comprised of a 77-minute, single-channel video, a gallery installation and an interactive online archive. The piece challenges inequities in the U.S. juvenile justice system by depicting, through documentation and reenactment, the stories of five individuals of different age, gender, economic background and race, who were sentenced to Life Without Parole (Natural Life) for crimes they committed as youth. The youthful status and/or lesser culpability of these youths, their background and their potential for rehabilitation, were not taken into account at any point in the charging and sentencing process. The five will never be evaluated for change, difference or growth. They will remain in prison till they die.

There are over 2500 inmates in the U.S. who are serving a Life Without Parole sentence for a crime they committed as juveniles. The U.S. is the only country in the world that allows Life Without Parole sentencing for youth.

The project's goal is to portray the ripple-effect that the sentence has had not only on the incarcerated youth and their victims, but also on the community at large. More than fifty hours of interviews with individuals who were involved with the crime, the arrest and the sentencing of the featured inmates were recorded. Among them judges, lawyers, police officers, reporters, wardens, teachers, child psychiatrists, legal experts and victims’ family members.

The interviews were coupled with staged scenes from court and from the main characters’ crime setting, as well as with detailed images of life in prison, reenacted by a group of high-school actors, and shot at an abandoned prison in Michigan.

A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS was shot intimately with my father and mother over a one and a half year period at their home in Florida. It is a portrait of their lives in the present, along a continuous present marked by frequent incursions into various pasts, real and imagined. My father has no colon. He is a narcoleptic. His friends are all dead. His life is dreamt. In the house there is my mother. There are the cats. And then there is a body without organs. -SG

Preceded byRESTLESS LEG SAGA by Shana Moulton(2012, HD video, 7:14)

In this edition of Moulton's narrative series, the artist's character Cynthia suffers from Restless Leg Syndrome, and seeks relief in pharmaceutical ads on TV and in health magazines. In a domestic world enlivened with animated dance and mystic poetry (written and read by poet John Coletti), Cynthia finds relief in the healing mineral AION A, discovered by Swiss artist Emma Kunz.

What lies within the frame? Art's oldest subject, the landscape, shifts under the weight of new technological processes. Lived Landscape presents a collection of short video pieces that attempt to push, reframe, preserve, and regulate composition within a horizontal canvas. Using moving image as a means to juxtapose illustrations and illusions these films attempt to orient themselves within an progressively mediated environment.

ALPI is the result of seven years of research on contemporary perceptions of the landscape of the Alps, juxtaposing places and situations across all eight bordering nations and spanning the territories of four languages. In the film, the Alps are encountered like an island that is connected to various global transformations. We undertook many journeys in the alpine region, which, ironically, led us as far as Dubai. The film shows the Alps as a key location, owing to its delicacy and environmental importance, where one can observe and study the complexity of social, economic, and political relationships. In the Europe of today, the Alps are a hotbed for modernity and its illusions. - AL

THE ISLAND OF ST. MATTHEWSAnd other recent work by KEVIN JEROME EVERSONScreening accompanied by a printing of A GIRL'S YOUNGTOWN by Jaqueline Marino from Belt Magazine. Discussion moderated by Belt Magazine Editor, Martha Bayne

Program Details:Fe26 (7 min, 2014) is a 16mm short film by Kevin Jerome Everson that follows two gentlemen around the East Side of Cleveland, Ohio and examines the tensions between illegal work –in this case, the stealing of manhole covers and copper piping--and the basic survival tactics that exist in areas of high unemployment.

THE ISLAND OF SAINT MATTHEWS (64 min, 2013) is a 16mm feature film about the loss of family history in the form of heirlooms and photographs. Years ago filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson asked his aunt about old family photographs. Her reply—that “we lost them in the flood” was the catalyst for this film, a poem and paean to the citizens of Westport, a community just west of Columbus, Mississippi, the hometown of the filmmaker’s parents. Residents, young and old, are here seen and heard reminiscing about the 1973 flood of the Tombigbee River. The film combines these interviews and conversations, filmed in front of a church, at a beauty school, on porches and backyards, with sequences of a waterskier on the Tombigbee River; a worker at the lock and dam; a young couple meeting with an insurance agent about flood insurance. The sound of a church bell—an original bronze sculpture made by the filmmaker and similar to the bell used to warn residents of an impending natural disaster—intones throughout, interspersed with a spare, elegiac score.

“With a sense of place and historical research, my films combine scripted and documentary elements with rich elements of formalism. The subject matter is the gestures or tasks caused by certain conditions in the lives of working class African Americans and other people of African descent. The conditions are usually physical, social-economic circumstances or weather. Instead of standard realism I favor a strategy that abstracts everyday actions and statements into theatrical gestures, in which archival footage is reedited or re-staged, real people perform fictional scenarios based on their own lives and historical observations intermesh with contemporary narratives. The films suggest the relentlessness of everyday life—along with its beauty—but also present oblique metaphors for art-making." -Kevin Jerome Everson

Kevin Jerome Everson was born and raised in Mansfield, Ohio. He has a MFA from Ohio University and a BFA from the University of Akron. He is currently a Professor of Art at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Everson was awarded the prestigious 2012 Alpert Award for Film/Video and was the subject in spring 2012 of a mid-career retrospective at Visions du Reel, Nyon Switzerland, a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2011 and a retrospective at Centre Pompidou in 2009. 2014 Solo Museum exhibitions included the Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, VA; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis and SECCA, Winston-Salem, NC. 2015. His films will be featured in the How to Remain Human exhibition at MOCA Cleveland May-Sept. 2015.

GUIDELINES explores the world of adolescence through a series of tableaux that illustrate the occasionally trying existence of young people at a rural secondary school. Emphasizing the contrasts between the regulated environment of the classroom and the beckoning freedom of the great outdoors, the film is structured around the teens’ meetings with various authority figures in the institution whose job it is to “set them straight.” During these encounters behind closed doors, the students’ day-to-day concerns emerge through the diversity of the stories they tell. Outside classroom hours, the students regain control of their world, the natural surroundings becoming a playground where they can test the limits of their temporary freedom. The documentary gradually sheds light on the interior drama of adolescence, with its shifts from fragility to reckless abandon. Relying mostly on uninterrupted long takes in order to record situations and emotions as faithfully as possible, the film makes a point of not criticizing either the education system or the youths’ behaviour. A work of patient observation, Guidelines paints a universal portrait of the ups and downs of the teen years.

EVERY SPEED is a short experimental documentary that looks at the meaning of movement for people with and without physical disabilities – both in terms of design and accessibility of cities and transportation as well as personal experiences of movement – in the context of a culture that places value on independence, speed, and physical ability. Through the conceptual devices of the animation and the voiceover interviews – which do not reveal the faces of the interview subjects – Every Speed removes the focus from individuals, some of whom may be accustomed to people staring at their physical disabilities, and increases awareness of the unifying experience of dependence when it comes to traveling around a city.

Jean-François Caissy, born in the village of Carleton-sur-Mer in Quebec, is an independent filmmaker and visual artist. His first documentary was 2005’s critically acclaimed La saison des amours. As an artist-in-residence for Les Films de L’Autre, he next directed La belle visite (2009), the first of his films to earn him international attention. It had its world premiere at the 60th Berlin International Film Festival, won Best Documentary at FICFA and was selected for numerous festivals around the world, including the BFI London Film Festival, Visions du Réel and Hot Docs. Trained as a photographer, Caissy is also a visual arts practitioner, and has had several gallery showings of his work. More recently, his video installation Derby was shown at the Centre Clark in Montreal and at Galerie Espace F in Matane, Quebec.

Julia Fuller is a filmmaker and photographer from Oakland, California who studied cognitive psychology and theatrical lighting design at Barnard College and has an MFA from Temple University. Her two experimental documentaries, Illness Magnified and Every Speed, have screened around the U.S, Canada, Europe and Australia as well as at conferences, symposiums, on television, and in classrooms. Julia works as an Editor and DP in Chicago and most recently edited Self-Deportation: The Untold Tale of A Marginal Woman directed by Eugene Park.

Lindsey Martin is a film and video maker from Virginia. She received a BFA in Photography and Film from Virginia Commonwealth University and an MFA in Film and Media Arts at Temple University in Philadelphia. Through hybrid narrative structures, home movie, audio recordings, documentary techniques, and by using non-actors as performers, her work depicts topics of gender identity, body image, and the microcosms of family structure.

ANLO SEPULVEDA + PAUL COLLINS are Texas based filmmakers who entered the scene with Sepulveda’s directorial debut, Otis Under Sky, at SXSW 2011, which Collins co-produced. Inspired by the beauty of the San Marcos River and pure cinema films such as "The Qatsi Trilogy" and "Baraka", they came together to create "Yakona".

Yako­na, meaning "rising water" in a local Native American language, is a visual journey through the crystal clear waters of the San Marcos River and its headwaters at Spring Lake. This film takes the viewer from prehistoric times through the modern era on an impressionistic journey from the perspective of the river. While filming, many extraordinary changes occurred surrounding the springs and river, including the removal of the Aquarena Springs theme park, the restoration of Spring Lake and the uncovering of ancient human remains. Sepulveda and Collins follow the river from source to sea, through the changing seasons, interpreting the river’s time and memory, and documenting the relationship between the natural world and man. Yakona speaks directly to the viewer with its beauty, appealing to humanity’s higher nature, and the viewer begins to understand this is a river that yearns to remain unchanged despite everything that is changing around it.

Sports remains America’s favourite sport. We’re here to watch games, to watch the unending machinations of humans in intractable situations, trying to be best and bounce within and against a series of rules. Sure, games are a metaphor but so’s everything. Monica Panzarino opens the whole event with an anthem performed with her Freqshift/Reverb Audio Bra. Seth Vanek hosts a variety show. TVTV takes us to the Super Bowl (featuring Bill Murray in his Links Hall debut). Dara Birnbaum skates cut through hospital soap. Josh Weissbach contends with the dire consequences of head-to-head combat head-to-head, while Christine Lucy Latimer scrambles the signals, signifiers and a few faces. Chris Collins provides a post-show wrap-up, using another form of aesthletics—making a piece over the course of the evening.

LIVE TO TAPE Artist Television Festival, a week-long — of performances and screenings of — May 18-24, curated by Links Hall Artistic Associate Jesse Malmed. Seven days of live talk shows, historical and contemporary moving image works and commissioned performances, television-as object, as concept, as antagonist, as material, as form, as inspiration-is unscrambled and reconceived. By turns hilarious and heartfelt, wonky and wild,Live to Tape gives us a glimpse into the futures and pasts of artist television. Over the course of the festival, Live to Tape will present a wide variety of performances and screenings organized into eight different video screening programs each followed by a talk show.

Roger Beebe is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art at the Ohio State University. He has screened his films around the globe at such unlikely venues as the CBS Jumbotron in Times Square and McMurdo Station in Antarctica as well as more likely ones including Sundance and the Museum of Modern Art. Recent solo shows of his work include the Laboratorio Arte Alameda (Mexico City), the Wexner Center for the Arts, and Anthology Film Archives. He has won numerous honors and awards including a 2013 MacDowell Colony residency, a 2009 Visiting Foreign Artists Grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, and a 2006 Individual Artist Grant from the State of Florida. Beebe is also a film programmer: he ran Flicker, a festival of small-gauge film in Chapel Hill, NC, from 1997-2000 and was the founder and Artistic Director of FLEX, the Florida Experimental Film Festival from 2004-2014.

Programmed by Jenny Miller

RECYCLED CINEMA

Strip Mall Trilogy (2001, 9:10, super8mm)“The Strip Mall Trilogy” is a series of three city symphonies that attempt to liberate color, sound, and form from the sprawling consumerist landscape of postmodern America. Part 1, “Green Means Go,” presents fragments of color over a musique concrete soundtrack composed of sounds recorded at the strip mall. Part 2, “The Abecedaire,” wrestles (and later plays) with alphabetic form extracted and abstracted from the signs of commerce of which they are normally a part. Part 3, “X-formations,” tries to argue that there is, in fact, beauty after strip malls. Let’s hope so. Parts 1 and 3 were edited entirely in camera.

Famous Irish Americans (2003, 8:00, digital video)Who’s your famous Irish American? Georgia O’Keefe? William McKinley? Sandra Day O’Connor? How about Shaquille O’Neal? This videotape is a secret history of some of our most overlooked Irish-American citizens; a hyperflat exploration of race, America, and the limits of binary thought.

Money Changes Everything (2009-2011, 5:00, 3x16mm)Three days in Las Vegas, Nevada; three different visions of the discarded past and of the constantly renewed future. A three-part portrait of a town in transformation: a suburban utopia in the desert, a cancerous sprawl of unplanned development, a destination for suicides.

S A V E (2006, 5:15, 16mm)A disused gas station offers a curious imperative to passersby: “SAVE.” A riddle posed in the form of architecture: what is there to save? One more installment in the history of Americans pointing their cameras at gas stations; an attempt to figure out something about where we’ve been, where we’re headed, and what’s been left behind. The first part of “S A V E” was edited entirely in camera.

AAAAA Motion Picture (2010, 12:00, 3x16mm)The Manhattan phone book has 14 pages of companies jockeying to be at the start of the alphabetical listings. Capitalism triumphs over linguistic richness yet again. Our challenge: to learn how to write poetry when there’s only one letter left.

Historia Calamitatum (2014, 21:00, HD digital)It’s all right to cry. Sometimes it’s better than all right.

SOUND FILM (2015, 12:00, 5x16mm)SOUND FILM explores the history and technologies of sound reproduction and the way we “picture” sound as image.

THE RADIANT and PEOPLE TO BE RESEMBLINGby The Otolith GroupScreened in association with LUX

THE OTOLITH GROUP was founded in 2002 and consists of Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun who live and work in London. During their longstanding collaboration The Group have drawn from a wide range of resources and materials. They explore the moving image, the archive, the sonic and the aural within the gallery context. The work is research based and in particular has focused on the essay film as a form that seeks to look at conditions, events and histories in their most expanded form.

PROGRAM DETAILS // 95 min // $8 advance or $10 at the doorPEOPLE TO BE RESEMBLING (2012, HD video, 22 min)A five sided portrait of the methodologies of the post-free jazz, pre-world music trio Codona

THE RADIANT (2012, HD video, 64 min)The Radiant travels through time and space to invoke the historical promises of nuclear energy and the threats of radiation that converge in Japan’s illuminated cities and evacuated villages in the months immediately following the Tohoku earthquake.

February’s RUN OF LIFE series presents Running Shorts!, a celebration of locally produced short experimental documentary film. The program features award winning pieces such as WINNIE WRIGHT, AGE 11 from the Kartemquin Films Archives, a 1974 16mm short that explores gentrification and its effects on a teenage girl in Chicago’s Gage Park; and Deborah Stratman’s acclaimed HACKED CIRCUIT, a single-shot, choreographed portrait of the Foley process from the final sequence of THE CONVERSATION, revealing multiple layers of fabrication and imposition. Also screening will be Kevin B. Lee’s TRANSFORMERS: THE PREMAKE a desktop documentary about the latest installment Michael Bay’s sprawling robot movie franchise and newcomer Michelle Nahmad’s animated doc THE SHOCHET, among others.

MAINTENANCE by Adele Horne( 2012, HD digital file, 91 minutes)Cleaning house is one of the most private things we do in our homes, other than sex and arguments. Although the product of of a clean home is socially valued, the work required to achieve it is not. This film bears witness to the invisible labor that makes up a huge part of our lives, in a series of portraits of people cleaning. MAINTENANCE was the recipient of the 2013 Images Prize, the top award at Toronto’s IMAGES festival.

Adele Horne makes documentary, essayistic, and experimental films. Her work has screened internationally at venues such as the Rotterdam Film Festival, Images Festival, Museum of Modern Art, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and the Flaherty Seminar. Her film The Tailenders was broadcast nationally on P.O.V. and won the “Truer than Fiction” prize in Film Independent’s Spirit Awards. She is a faculty member at California Institute of the Arts.

Ian Curry is a filmmaker whose work celebrates the sensuality, magic, and history of the physical medium of 16 millimeter film. His work focuses on manipulating film through experimental processes and testing its limits by way of designed apparatuses for presentation. He often uses hand processing, optical printing, contact printing, and in-camera editing to reveal a passing moment’s brilliance or a presented moment’s faltering truth. Previously of Bridgewater, MA, and Boston, Curry has exhibited his works in gallery, screening, and performance contexts. He earned a BFA at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston and an MFA at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Dr. Rebecca Gomperts sails a ship around the world, providing abortions at sea for women with no legal alternative. Her idea begins as flawed spectacle, faced with governmental, religious, and military blockade. But with each roadblock comes a more refined mission, until Rebecca realizes she can use new technologies to bypass law – and train women to give themselves abortions using WHO-researched protocols with pills.

From there we witness her create an underground network of emboldened, informed activists who trust women to handle abortion themselves. Vessel is Rebecca’s story: one of a woman who hears and answers a calling, and transforms a wildly improbable idea into a global movement.

Program Details: 88 min // USA // 2014 // HD Video

Preceeded by a reading fromJANE: Documents From Chicago’s Clandestine Abortion Service 1968-1973

Post Screening Discussion with Jeanne Galatzer-Levy of the JANE Collective

Diana Whitten (director/producer) has a decade of professional film/TV direction, production and design experience. She founded Sovereignty Productions in 2008, following a Fulbright Fellowship to Indonesia, and was the Director of Communications at Ford Foundation International Fellowships Program. Vessel, her first feature film, premiered at South by Southwest Film Festival and won the Audience Award in the Documentary Competition, as well as a Special Jury Award for Political Courage. Awards include the inaugural Peter Wintonick Award from Sheffield DocFest, an Honorable mention for the Moving Mountains Award at Mountainfilm in Telluride, and the Adrienne Shelly Excellence in Filmmaking Award.

Jeanne Galatzer-Levy was a member of the JANE Collective. These days she is associate director in the UIC News Bureau, handling media relations for the biomedical and natural sciences. Her previous experience includes media relations for the American Medical Association, the University of Chicago and the Alzheimer’s Association. Her freelance experience includes articles on health topics in the Chicago Tribune, Tribune Magazine and Loyola Medicine. She has a master’s degree in biochemistry from UIC, an undergraduate degree in anthropology from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in science journalism from Columbia College.

Experimental documentary-maker Andrés Duque travels to Mozambique to look for old footage that had been made there. But when it becomes apparent that his elderly father is seriously ill, he returns to his homeland of Venezuela. As his father lies dying in a hospital room in Venezuela, the filmmaker’s thoughts travel to Mozambique. Images of dance and revolution – some retrieved from archival footage, some newly shot – conjure up a spectral alternate reality where human figures take part in a cascade of excited movements. A commentary on the finiteness of life, Dress Rehersal for Utopia emanates a personal collage in which feelings transcend- part experimental travelogue, part political statement. A gentle rustling links the different images, their origins and significance together.

Andrés Duque is a Spanish-Venezuelan filmmaker. studied journalism in his homeland before moving to Spain for a master’s degree in creative documentary at the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona. He now works as a filmmaker, film programmer and teacher.He is best known for his 2004 film “Ivan Z”, a portrait of the cult filmmaker Ivan Zulueta, which participated in dozens of international film festivals and received a Goya Award nomination. In 2011, he made his first feature film debut with COLOR RUNAWAY DOG. The film premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and won the Audience Award at Punto de Vista International Documentary Film Festival. He was a featured artist at 2012 Flaherty Film Seminar and in 2013 he won the City of Barcelona Award for DRESS REHEARSAL FOR UTOPIA.

Katie Williams is one half of Patchwork Farms, an urban farm in Chicago, founded and operated by herself and Molly Medhurst. She is a storyteller and rugby player. Her thoughtful Bruce Springsteen cover band, Miss Bossy and The D Street Band recently played the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art. They hope to play more museums and maybe weddings.

Kelly Christian is a Chicago-based researcher, writer, and artist. Her most recent work explores postmortem and funerary photography. Kelly photographed military funerals in Maine during the height of the Iraq War and created her own new media-Daguerreotypes. She has presented her work at conferences and galleries across the country on postmortem photography, embalming, and “corpse-as-culture.”

PUBLIC HEARING re-performs a rural American town meeting from a transcript downloaded as publicly available information. Shot entirely in cinematic close-up on black-and-white 16mm film, a cast of actors and non-actors read between the lines in an ironic debate over thereplacement of an existing Wal-Mart with a super Wal-Mart.

PUBLIC HEARING is the first feature documentary film by James N. Kienitz Wilkins, filmed in one room with an ensemble cast of professional actors, sculptors, filmmakers, musicians and businessmen. The subject of the hearing is the environmental impact of an existing Wal-Mart expanding to become a super Wal-Mart. The source material and screenplay is direct text from a publicly released transcript downloaded from the town website of Allegany, New York. The text was preserved in chronological order with no additions, only redactions due to budget: a loss of the most redundant of the redundant. As a film meant to be watched rather than a purely structuralist exercise, this limiting technique reflects the reality of the public hearing itself, which forced comments for which there was no time to be submitted in writing.

Once visualized as a film, the focus of PUBLIC HEARING drifts from the seemingly unremarkable text to the theatrics of the bumbling tautological twins recognized as process and protocol (practically embodied by the moderator and chairman, respectively). The hearing turns into a

redundant lesson in how to attend a public hearing, for both the original attendees, and through reenactment, the ever-expanding audience of the film. And new ways of listening and watching emerge. Public Hearing might be proposed as a formal experiment and a satirical experience: a didactic comedy. It is a documentary in the most literal sense.

The project was supported in part by the Jerome Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Foundation for Contemporary Arts (Emergency Grants), Puffin Foundation, Media Arts Assistance Fund, and Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts,Inc.

James N. Kienitz Wilkins is a filmmaker and artist living in Brooklyn. He is the recipient of numerous grants and periodic awards for various projects of specific and/or universal proportions. He is a graduate of the Cooper Union School of Art in New York City.

In the model of C-SPAN, the Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network that documents and broadcasts the goings on of governmental spaces for public edification, CA-PAN documents and broadcasts the goings on of museums, galleries, and other spaces of art exhibition and display. With the same mandate as any public affairs network, events documented are not paired with commercial interruption, musical underscores, or superfluous editing in order to deliver undifferentiated information to the art public. Events covered by CA-PAN are as formal as panel discussions, banal as a single camera recording a single static artwork in a gallery for hours, or as informal as a raucous dance party.

Chaz Evans is an artist, educator, writer, and is Co-Director of Video Game Art (VGA) Gallery. He teaches courses on creative programming, web art, and games at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and DePauw University. His work analyzes the cultural valences of technology, and builds continuity between contemporary media and the art historical past. His writing has been published in Journal of Games Criticism and MediaCommons. His artwork has been exhibited by Hyde Park Art Center, Evanston Art Center, Chicago Artists Coalition, and ACRE_TV. He holds an MA in art history and an MFA in New Media Art from University of Illinois at Chicago.

Immigrant residents of a “shift-bed” apartment in the heart of New York City’s Chinatown share their stories of personal and political upheaval. As the bed transforms into a stage, the film reveals the collective history of the Chinese in the United States through conversations, autobiographical monologues, and theatrical movement pieces. Shot in the kitchens, bedrooms, wedding halls, cafés, and mahjong parlors of Chinatown, this provocative hybrid documentary addresses issues of privacy, intimacy, and urban life. Working from the idea that anytime someone is on camera they inadvertently engage in a performance, Sachs asked her subjects to become her collaborators, inviting them to participate in the construction of a film about their lives. In 2012, Lynne began a series of live film performances of Your Day is My Night in alternative theater spaces around New York City. She then completed the hour-long hybrid video which premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in 2013 and screened at the Vancouver Film Fest, Union Docs, the New Orleans Film Fest and other venues in the US and abroad.

Lynne Sachs makes films, installations, performances, and web projects that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences by weaving together poetry, collage, painting, politics, and layered sound design. Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, she searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in her work with each and every new project. Lynne also teaches experimental film and video at New York University and and The New School and lives in Brooklyn.

Sean Hanley is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker pursuing experiments in the documentary genre. His short film work, including narrative, documentary, and animation, has been exhibited in film festivals across the United States and Canada. He is the Assistant Director of Mono No Aware, an independent arts organization that hosts an annual exhibition of international expanded cinema in addition to offering year long filmmaking workshops. Aside from teaching 16mm workshops with Mono No Aware, he instructs video production courses at DCTV. For the past three years he has been a staff member of the Flaherty Film Seminar.

An unbiased escape from the “norm of documentary film making,” Dragonslayer was the Grand Jury Prize Winner for Best Documentary at SXSW 2011 and the second feature film to be released theatrically by Drag City Records following Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers. An intimate vérité portrait of the life and times of Josh “Skreech” Sandoval, a 23-year-old skate legend from the stagnant suburbs of Fullerton, California, Dragonslayer takes the viewer through a golden SoCal haze of lost youth, broken homes and abandoned swimming pools, set to a soundtrack of bands from indie-rock labels Mexican Summer and Kemado Records-including Best Coast, Bipolar Bear, Children, Dungen, Jacuzzi Boys, Death, and Thee Oh Sees.

Tristan Patterson is a screenwriter living in Los Angeles. He has written screenplays for Disney, Fox and Warner Brothers, and is currently writing American Cigarette for director Tony Scott and Fox 2000. He is attached to direct his own screenplay Electric Slide starring Ewan McGregor for Killer Films and Myriad Pictures. Dragonslayer is his first feature.

Eva Marie Rødbro is a Danish moving image artist and photographer who captures restless and visceral portraits of youth. She spent a year studying at Fatamorgana, the Danish school of art photography, and graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam in 2008. Rødbro’s publications include Dubi (2005), Collectables (2007), Limbo (2007) and Fuck you kiss me (2008). She has been a correspondent for VICE Magazine and I TOUCHED HER LEGS won the Emerging Experimental Video Artist Award at the 49th Ann Arbor Film Festival.

Nick Nummerdor is the creative director of Little Cabin Films, a production company he started in 2009 and the founder of Chicago Youth Skateboard Project, a non profit that distributes free skateboards and equipment to inner city children and teenagers in an effort to promote healthy lifestyle choices and artistic freedom. He is currently directing and shooting a documentary on public skateparks that has been in production for over 2 years following the developments and work involved with getting a free public skatepark made in Chicago. He also co-directed the 2013 documentary “Vannin'” about van enthusiasts.

Steven “Dread” Snyder is a skater from Albion, Michigan who came over to Chicago in 1984 to attend the Art Institute of Chicago. His skating skills were quickly recognized and he was sponsored by Alva Skateboards. He has lived in Chicago ever since.

JANE GILLOOLY is a non-fiction and narrative film/video maker whose work is inspired and informed by a century of non-fiction filmmaking, silent and vintage cinema, and activism. Gillooly consistently surprises as she crosses new boundaries and confronts new subjects with a distinctive vision. Her current work, Suitcase of Love and Shame, repurposes historical material for use in time-based media collage and is indicative of an evolving filmography. Gillooly uniquely balances a commitment to emotional authenticity with a sensorial, textural style driven by striking images, sounds, and a musical approach to editing. Gillooly has an enormous capacity for capturing the complexities of real characters on film. As in her previous works, Today the Hawk Takes One Chick, (2008) and Leona’s Sister Gerri, (1995), Gillooly demonstrates a compassion for and instinctive understanding of the nuances of human emotion.

Preceded by FROM ALEX TO ALEX by Alison SM Kobayashi

ALISON S.M. KOBAYASHI is an artist working in video, performance, installation and drawing. She was born in Mississauga, Canada where she received a BA from the University of Toronto. She now lives in Brooklyn where she is the Director of Special Projects at UnionDocs, a Center for Documentary Art. In her work, Kobayashi performs a variety of characters that are both studiously and playfully rendered. These personas are inspired by Kobayashi’s extensive collection of lost, discarded and donated objects; ranging from answering machine tapes purchased at a secondhand shop to a love letter left on a sidewalk. Through repeated interaction with the objects (listening, transcribing, re-enactment, play) narratives and imagery begin to manifest and inspire performances, videos, installations and drawings. The results are humorous, low-fi artifacts of an artist embodying the lives of others. Kobayashi’s short videos have been exhibited and screened widely in Canada, the United States and overseas. She was a guest artist at the 2008 Flaherty Film Seminar and her body of work was a Spotlight Presentation at Video Out, Jakarta International Film Festival, Indonesia. In 2012, she was commissioned by Les Subsistances in Lyon, France to produce her first live performance, Defense Mechanism. She is currently developing her second live performance. Johanna Linsley is writing on Kobayashi’s work in relation to eavesdropping in the soon to be published Voice(s): Critical Approaches to Process, Performance and Experience (Routledge).

PROGRAM DETAILS // 77 min // $8 advance or $10 at the door

FROM ALEX TO ALEX (6 min, 11 sec / 2006 /VIDEO)

In the fall of 2003 I found a letter on the Winston Churchill Blvd QEW overpass.It was labeled From: Alex To: Alex.This is a film based on the contents of that letter.

SUITCASE OF LOVE AND SHAME (70 min / 2013 / VIDEO)

Tender, erotic, and pathetic, this reconstructed narrative examines the obsession to chronicle the details of an adulterous affair. Suitcase of Love and Shame is a mesmerizing collage woven from 60 hours of reel-to-reel audiotape discovered in a suitcase purchased on eBay. Recorded in the 1960’s, a Midwestern woman and her lover become reliant on recording devices to document and memorialize their affair. The film aims at a cross-generational consciousness about exhibitionism, privacy and voyeurism. Focusing on the aural and experiential nature of the audio the imagery in the film is restrained – abstract, evocative and expectant, so that the audience will see with their ears. The listener/viewer is variously located within and outside of the events – complicit and voyeuristic. The “eavesdropping viewer” is compelled, despite feeling embarrassed and uncomfortable with the knowledge and access they have been given into the transgressions they imagine they see. Selected to screen as part of the distinguished Art of The Real series at the Film Society at Lincoln Center 2014, the film has screened internationally winning Best International Film at Images Festival in Toronto.